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Topic: Official Praise Thread (Read 24055 times)

I gotta say, This game is great. It's really fun, very good even in beta, and with any luck it will be the next Bejeweled! It's also got great little touches like right clicking dimming out other color blocks (by far better than mentally tuning into a color I'm looking for), and promises to be one of my best puzzle acquisitions for a long time to come.

Feel free to quote me on this X, and to others, let's keep the praise in one thread so as not to skew the new forum's content (or something)

Thanks, RCIX! I've stickied this topic, as you were essentially suggesting. And I've also added your comment to the Press and Player Reactions page. As others comment, if they're willing I will include some of those there, too. Bear in mind that I'm not soliciting fake praise, all.

I won't be able to use all quotes on the main press page simply because 1) often I don't have time to update the site real frequently when we're in the middle of a beta, and more importantly, 2) typically I try to keep the press page from getting too ridiculously long, which means that I'll skip some quotes that are touching on points that I feel have already been adequately covered on that press page. It's never anything personal -- and, even if your quote is repetitive, we really appreciate any comments you care to leave in this thread, since people will be looking at this as much as the press page, over time, I'm sure!

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I might as well join in...Lars got me playing the game the other night, and it's really pretty awesome, I have to say. Very addicting, like the better puzzle games seem to be. The game mechanics (what with the spark and the arrowed blocks) is pretty interesting. I know I have something good when I accidentally play it for several hours straight.

Wow, that's a really great review and I'm thrilled you're having such a good time with the game. I think it's really unfortunate how much people generally seem to see the puzzle genre as being really stale and as little more than Tetris or Bejeweled clones, so I'm really glad to be playing a role in making something that differs from those in important and enjoyable ways. I think there's a lot of room for innovation in this genre, but it's very difficult to come up with fun, unique ideas. All too often you get something that is fun or unique, but not both, and in the cases where you do manage to achieve both of those, this is a genre where it's so easy to be overlooked because it's such an oversaturated market. There's definitely a trend toward cookie-cutter design with these games because that's easy and can pay off while finding a fun, unique game mechanic isn't easy and often doesn't pay off (I can name quite a few fantastic puzzle games no one's ever heard of that surely completely failed at market).

Regarding your issue with apparent slowdown on the adventure map, I believe that may be related to an issue with the Windows version that causes animation speeds to be twice as fast when the cursor is moving. This was very apparent with things like clouds, since they doubled in speed when moving the cursor. It's largely fixed in the latest release, but still appears in a couple places that should be fixed sometime soon, I'm sure. As for higher resolutions, the issue with that is that the background artwork is only so large, so any higher resolutions would require scaling things up or having a lot of dead space around the background. I'll let Chris speak more on that later (since there's probably more to say about it), but I think there are also some other posts about this on the forums somewhere.

Wow, yes, thanks for the early review! I've linked that on our press and player reactions page. Lars (Fiskbit) pretty much summed up my reaction to it.

The issue with the slowdown on the adventure map is something that I think was fixed in the 0.411 version of the game, but if not definitely seems fixed in 0.412. It was actually a speedup issue, not a slowdown issue, as the clouds should have been moving the slower speed the whole time. Of course, if that doesn't seem to be the issue, then please do let us know!

Regarding the larger resolutions, we'll have to go to letterboxing, and that's definitely something on our list for the "polish" phase. It won't let the backgrounds scale up, or anything of that sort, because there simply isn't anything more to show there (background image wise, etc). But I think we can work around that so that if you have, for example, a 1280x1024 resolution native, you can see the game in 1280x768 with just some black bars at the top and bottom, and thus at full crispness. For people on larger resolutions than that, the letterboxing would get even more severe and I'd suggest using a smaller resolution to upscale the game unless things still are legible based on monitor size, etc. At least that should improve the number of options people have display-wise, when we hit that stage!

Thanks again for taking the time to write that, as Lars said!

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Thanks for the replies. I had a feeling that increasing the resolution size probably wasn't fully doable on the game as you had it. It was only a minor gripe as I have 2 22" monitors so I have up to 1680X1050 that I can achieve. Its no big issue. If you can make it bigger, great. If not, no big deal. Not all games can hit that high. As for the slow-down or speed up, I just checked this morning and I could not replicate the issue. So I guess you did fix it.

As per the Puzzle genre being dead. I agree with Lars on it. Most of the time, games released for the genre are pretty quiet in the big scheme of things. You don't often hear raving reviews of the newest puzzle games through. However, I am also not a big fan of the genre so puzzle games do not often catch my attention. Probably the only reason Tidalis caught my attention was Ai War and the video you linked on Tidalis via Twitter some time ago. It also helped that the BETA had a free trial version of it.